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20th Century Fox’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens this Friday, and the town’s big-gun critics only just saw it tonight. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the standard term for showing a movie this late in the game is “hide the ball.” Which publicists tend to do when the movie in question isn’t very good. Except Rise of the Planet of The Apes is really good. It’s easily the best Apes movie ever made, and that includes the original.

Rise is sharper, tighter, more emotional…lacking a Statue of Liberty finale, okay, but nonetheless with a “better” story in a sense. And without the perfectly styled, Vidal Sassoon ape coifs that bothered me so in the Charlton Heston original. Not one orangutan had a single hair out of that place in that film, the reason being of course that the prosthetic makeup guys felt more compelled to represent the sartorial values of Beverly Hills, ape-appearance-wise, than the corresponding particulars in a world first imagined by French novelist Pierre Boulle.

We’re talking about a gripping, compassionate, well-plotted sci-fi fantasy popcorn film — riveting, amusing at times, state-of-the-art CG, movingly acted by performance-capture guy Andy Serkis, etc. No, I’m not exaggerating. It has excitement, intrigue, humanity, empathy, soul. And the story is primarily an ape POV thing — the human actors are strictly backup, speaking the same kind of rote expository dialogue that James Arness, Joan Weldon and Edmund Gwenn spoke in Them!.

So what was 20th Century Fox thinking? Why didn’t they show the whole thing at ComicCon instead of just clips? Why did I have to ask to attend tonight’s screening? Why did Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny, who knows fantasy-genre stuff better than most of us, have to plead to get in? I don’t get it. And telling reviewers to hold until Thursday is just…what? This is a really good film. It’s not out of line to say that a franchise has probably been reborn, if they want to go there.

And don’t listen to guys like Lewis Beale, who earlier this evening called Rise a “fun, not-intellectually-taxing summer entertainment.” C’mon…it’s much better than that. It’s a compassionate look at imprisonment and oppression, and a rousing saga of rebellion and revolution. And it all levitates courtesy of some of the best motion-capture CG I’ve ever seen.

Okay, the apes seem a little too “CG”-ish and animated here and there but let’s not be crabby. This is a very strong, very on-target entertainment.

What could have been just another blah-blah origin story has been turned into a simian Spartacus….or more precisely the first act of Spartacus, which ends with the slaves breaking out of the gladiator school in Capua. That’s precisely how Rise concludes, so to speak.

James Franco plays a nice-guy genetic scientist — intelligent, tactful, bland — who’s trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease by performing serum tests on apes. He soon realizes that a serum given to a chimp mother named “Bright Eyes” (remember who had that nickname before?) has been passed along to an orphaned baby chimp named Caesar. The little chimp soon proves to be a major-league achiever and learner. Franco also tries out the serum on his Alzheimer’s-afflicted dad (John Lithgow), and it’s Awakenings all over again. But Ceasar’s passion and curiosity leads to complications and the authorities seize and lock him up.

This is when the Spartacus stuff kicks in. We’re not going to take this any more, fellow apes, and I’m the one to lead you guys out of this, because I’m smart and ballsy and a good strategic thinker. (Harry Potter costar Tom Felton plays roughly the same part that Charles McGraw played in Spartacus. Or the “Fritz” role that Dwight Frye had in Frankenstein.)

Franco hooks up with the beautiful Freida Pinto early on, but this is of no consequence as she has no extended dialogue scenes of any kind. As always, she’s very pretty. She obviously has to do more that just look great if she’s going to last. Her best chance at showing what she’s got will probably come with Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna, an Indian-set adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The apes are the soul and the spirit of the film. They’re fascinating, fully-emotional and fully-dimensional characters. Much of Rise is non-verbal, and appropriately so. Serkis, I should add, tends to over-emote at times. The facial expressions he gives to the young Ceasar — the lead ape protagonist — are just a tad too expressive for my taste, a wee bit too “actor”-ish. But I’ll probably be in the minority on this issue. There’s already talk about Serkis deserving a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. I would have no argument with that at all. The AMPAS actors branch, traditionally fearful of CG-emoting, will probably try to nip this notion in the bud.

“I just saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” a friend wrote a couple of hours ago, “and even though I’m not supposed to say anything, I enjoyed it thoroughly as a fun, not-intellectually-taxing summer entertainment. (Full disclosure: I love the Apes franchise, except for the Burton atrocity.) But my wife, who also had fun with it, was wondering: who’s the audience? Other than the Apes cultists — and they’re out there — there doesn’t seem to be a must-see factor here. Am I wrong?”

Rise opens on Friday, 8.5 — three days hence. How eager is the want-to-see?

What everyone loves about sitting on the beach is that you know that the way the surf looks and sounds and smells today, right now, is pretty much exactly as it looked, smelled and sounded 49 years ago when Marilyn Monroe posed for this shot. Or 500 or 750 or 2,000 years ago. It never changes. I’m writing this because I like the photo, and I wish right now I could be sitting in this exact same spot. Except I have to go see Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

I had to run out to an 11 am screening of Gavin O’Connor‘s Warrior (Lionsgate, 9.9), a rousing, emotionally emphatic, Mixed Martial Arts family drama that I’m not allowed to review at this time. But Tom Hardy is the shit in this thing. The instant he appeared on-screen I knew he was up to something extra-special and quite fierce. He gives one of the most intense burn-through, seething-machismo performances I’ve ever seen in a mainstream feature.

Hardy’s Warrior character is an AWOL Marine who eats his MMA opponents in the cage. He’s a quiet animal in a hoodie, he’s Bane, he walks like a fucking musclebound gorilla, he’s bruised and compassionate and crying inside, and he’s really something else.

Longtime HE reader James Kent has written to explain why he’ll no longer be following the column. The reason is basically LexG, he says. I realize there’s a major annoyance factor out there, and I also think I’ve made it clear I won’t tolerate LexG’s self-pitying remarks about women or loneliness and/or occasional threats of suicide. But I respect good writing from any corner and the wisdom and the ability to cut through the crap. I wish more commenters had that slash-through quailty, and I also wish LexG would try to develop more personal discipline.

It could be inferred that Kent reps the HE “silent majority” readership. My reply to him is that silent sideliners make their own bed. You can’t sit silently when something annoys you. Speak up, explain and tell off….or live with it.

“I’ve debated this several times over the past few weeks, but I think I finally reached my decision point,” Kent writes. ‘I’ve been a loyal reader of your various sites since 1998. I stumbled upon you by accident and I’ve enjoyed, while not always agreeing, with your reviews, rants, crusades, causes, passions etc. But over the past couple of years there’s definitely been a change. The heavy emphasis on comments to your posts have created my least favorite part of the site. It seems that more often, than not, when someone has something insightful to say the topic quickly gets uprooted by someone with their own singular agenda.

“As I’ve mentioned a couple of times to you in the past, for me the worst has been, and always will be, LexG. I know you value his writing and have a thing for him, whatever. But I would really like to see the counterpoint raised — about the people who don’t enjoy him. Or, more importantly, the people whose experience with your sight has been ruined by the non stop posting of this manipulative egomaniac. His postings on your Jason Bateman switch movie is the last straw for me. He is so consumed with himself that he wants everything and anything about your column to revert back to him.

“I am not sure you understand how offensive it is to some of your audience to see a guy like this get such a forum. He threatens suicide and you give him a spotlight? What???

“You know, I don’t go crying and complaining about how things turned out for me. I went to film school at NYU in the early 90’s. I took a stab at Hollywood in my youth. It didn’t work out for me. I decided happiness was more important than years trying to make it as a filmmaker. I’m okay with the decisions I made. I’ve got a good career going. I have a wife and a small boy. I still enjoy going to the movies. And I have zero sympathy for a guy like LexG who wallows in his own misery. That behavior makes me sick and reading about it on what was, once, my favorite blog, is repulsive.

“Yet every time one person tries to point this out on your site a dozen more jump to this guy’s defense. So I’m left with two possibilities: either I am just in the minority and this is the culture of the internet, or there is a segment of people who read your site, like me, who don’t feel the need to post all the time. We hate how the LexG’s of the internet make these sites their home, and all of the attention he gets, and we say nothing. And I’d wager many have left and said nothing.

“But to me that doesn’t help you. I feel it is important to let you know that after 13 years I am deciding to leave this site. I will miss your writing, but I will not miss for one single second that repulsive human being. I have no sympathy for him, and his self-destructive behavior. Enough’s enough for me. You value his type of reader, and not my kind, so I have to make my own choice. It was a hard decision and even harder one to write you about this. I stopped any of my occasional postings three weeks ago when all of his suicide bullshit came about. Now I leave your site for good.

“I will always enjoy you, Jeff. But I can no longer endorse what’s been going on. I only wish LexG had a site of his own. And I think I know why he doesn’t. Because then we’d all have a choice not to go to it.

“You’re still the man, man. I wish you the best!”

Reason TV, a libertarian channel, has posted footage of Matt Damon debating the role of teachers during a Save Our Schools rally outside the White House on 7.30.11. The purpose of the event: “To put the public back in public schools.” The six-minute video [click here] was produced, shot and edited by Jim Epstein. Hosted by Michelle Fields.

The Good Will Hunting clip is a snarky editorial comment about Damon being a weepy liberal type — ignore it. The last line is great.

There’s a review embargo in place on The Change-Up (Universal, 8.5) until 4 pm today But I half-liked it to my surprise, and my evening was made at the after-party when costar Jason Bateman came over to say hi and tell me that he’s a regular HE reader/fan/admirer. Then he said, “Thanks for classing up the internet” or words to that effect. There are haters who would disagree (and I don’t want or need that debate right now), but it felt great all the same.

I spoke to Jonah Hill briefly about Moneyball (“See you in Toronto!”), and also to Sandra Bullock about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, about which she said (a) “I’m in it!” and (b) “It only finally finished [shooting] a couple of weeks ago.”

Too close to Olivia Wilde as I shot this — too many bodies, overly warm, no room to breathe.

Inside Job dp Svetlana Cvetko (r.) and her niece Nastasa Radisic (r.)

In honor of Jeff Prosserman‘s forthcoming Chasing Madoff (Cohen Media Group, 8.26), which I’ll finally be seeing on Wednesday, here’s a re-posting of a pretty good March 2009 piece about how Madoff might have lived his life and spent his time if he’d decided to lam it.

David Dobkin‘s The Change-Up (Universal, 8.5), an allegedly raunchy body-switch comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, is having a big Westwood premiere tonight. The trailer has me scared because it has Bateman and Reynolds shouting “aaahhh!” when they realize they’re no longer themselves and have switched lives. It also implies that the film likes poo-poo and pee-pee humor, and that’s not good either. Plus I don’t like gags about guys getting all frazzled trying to take care of wailing babies. I’m just being honest.

It’s not funny when actors go “aaaahhh!”….ever. If you play a part in a big-studio comedy and you do an “aaahhh!, you’ve soiled your reputation for life. Would Jeremy Irons do an “aaahhh!”? Would Peter Finch, Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, George Arliss, Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn or Van Johnson do one? What kind of moron do you have to be to even snicker at an “aaahhh!” moment, much less laugh at one?

If I was a studio head I would say to every director making a big-budget comedy on my lot, “If you put an ‘aaahhh!’ bit into your film, I will not only fine you $50,000 but I will surreptitiously hire guys to break some of your bones — your choice.”

I’ll tell you what. If nobody goes “aaahhh!” in The Change-Up, I’ll go easy. Maybe the “aaahhh!” bits didn’t make the final cut, I mean, and they were just used for the trailer.

After The Wedding Crashers I thought Dobkin was some kind of genius. I thought he might be Judd Apatow 2. There were no “aaahhh!” bits in that film, for one thing. The writing was too good. Then he exec produced Mr. Woodcock and directed Fred Claus, the Vince Vaughn comedy. “Jesus, how could the guy who directed The Wedding Crashers direct Fred Claus?,” I asked myself. Now I’m thinking that Dobkin is just another highly proficient pro-for-hire like Shawn Levy, Dennis Dugan and Peter Segal.

On top of which The Change-Up was penned by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who did The Hangover and The Hangover, Part II. That also scares me. I’m also scared of the possible influences from producer Neal Moritz (Fast & Furious, Click)

Three months ago I wrote that “there’s a brief segment in Woody Allen‘s Husbands and Wives in which Allen’s character reads a short story about a champagne-sipping womanizer envying the married guy who lives down the hallway, and vice versa. The Change-Up is a feature-length riff on this idea, goaded by a supernatural premise.

“I used to ask myself if Ryan Reynolds will ever topline a really well-made commercial mainstream movie. Not a pretty good one like The Proposal or an interesting but unsatisfying indie-exercise pic like Buried, but a sharp, snappy, laugh-out-loud exception on the level of Dobkin’s The Wedding Crashers. Will it ever happen?”

Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde and Alan Arkin costar.

I sent an inquiry about the Academy’s current Best Picture voting rules to TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, EW‘s Dave Karger and Anthony Breznican, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil. The bottom line is that the Academy’s “surplus rule,” which only Pond and maybe 13 or 14 other people in the world fully comprehend in all its labrynthian detail, means that the 5% rule (or is it a 9% rule?) doesn’t apply all that strictly.

WARNING: The following is one of the most perplexing and brain-shredding articles I’ve written for Hollywood Elsewhere.

My previous understanding had been that under the new rules, no movie gets Best Picture-nominated unless 5% of the Academy membership mark it as their #1 preference. My new understanding is that this rule sorta kinda applies but not all the way around the block. Or it really does apply all the way around the block but there are gremlins and gang members hiding in bushes ready to hoodwink you. Plus you need to be a math nerd to figure out all the Pythagorian side-winding exceptions, and life is short so let’s all have a double Jack Daniels.

I really hate writing these stories but it boils down to the fact that with the Academy membership totalling a bit more than 6000, a film needs 455 first-choice, top-of-the-list votes to be a rock-solid, no-questions-asked Best Picture nominee. But a somewhat less popular film can also get nominated if it’s the recipient of surplus votes. And surplus votes — stay with me — come into play any time a film gets 20 percent more than it needs to qualify, or 20% more than 455 or an extra 91 votes. Or something like that.

So if War Horse gets 20% more than it needs to qualify, which is to say 455 votes plus 91 votes equalling 546 votes, then some other film will be the beneficiary.

I don’t want to get into this any further, okay? I really hate this stuff. I can feel my brain chipping away in small styrofoam chunks. I’m not in high school any more and I don’t have to learn this stuff or risk getting a failing grade so, you know, eff it. Okay, I’ll give it another try.

Pond explained it thusly in a recent Wrap piece: “You need 455 votes to be nominated but you get twice that many, 910, each of your votes will count 50 percent for you and 50 percent for the voter’s next choice. If you get a third more votes than you need, that third will go to your second choice.”

I can’t stand thinking about this stuff!

What if 33% of the Academy puts War Horse at the top of the list, and 29% go for Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close in the #1 slot, and 11% go for The Descendants and 11% go for Moneyball and/or The Ides of March?,” I wrote the Oscar gang. “That would be 96% of the Academy’s membership putting four films in the top slot and only 4% left over. So that means four Best Picture nominations…right?

No, not right. With a guaranteed five-nomination rule and if the voting works out along the lines as I’ve just speculated, the fifth or sixth or seventh-strongest Best Picture nominee could land a Best Picture nomination by getting only a measly 4% or 3% or 2% of the Academy members to put it at the top of their list. The surplus rule kicks and they slide right in there despite having tallied very little rock-sold support in the initial balloting.

Confused yet? Here’s Pond’s explanation, sent to me today:

“Sorry, but this is going to involve lots of math. Here goes:

“When the ballots are counted for the first time, the accountants will assume that 10 slots are up for grabs. This creates a magic number that will guarantee a nomination. This magic number (you really don’t want me to explain how they get it) is about 9% of the vote.” Wells intervention: 9%? What happened to 5%?

“If you get 20% more than this — which works out to about 11% — you trigger the surplus rule. I’ll use your numbers to illustrate:

“In your example, War Horse gets 33% of the vote. But it only needs 11% to guarantee a nomination. In effect, it only needs one-third of its votes. So every ballot that lists War Horse #1 now counts 1/3 of a vote for War Horse (all it needs to get nominated), and 2/3 for whatever film is listed second.

“If Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close gets 29% of the vote, it only needs 38% of each of those votes to be nominated. So its votes count 38% for Extremely Loud, and 62% for whatever’s listed second.

“The Descendants gets 23%, so it only needs 48% of each vote. The other 52% goes to each Descendants voter’s second choice.

“And Moneyball and The Ides of March got what they needed, so their ballots aren’t redistributed.

“One wrinkle: What if the accountants go to a Descendants ballot to allocate 52% of its vote to the second choice, but that second choice is War Horse, which already has more votes than it needs? In that case, the 52% goes to the voter’s third choice, or to the highest-ranked choice that hasn’t already secured a nomination.

“At the end of the first round of your hypothetical count, there will be indeed be four Best Picture nominees. But there will also still be a whole bunch of ballots still in play — all those War Horse ballots, for instance, will still be alive, counting for two-thirds of a vote. And all those 2/3 votes, plus the 62% Extremely Loud votes, plus the 52% Descendants votes, should be enough to bump something else over the 5% threshold after those surplus ballots have been redistributed.”

Wells intervention: Jesus!

“There’s also one more round of redistribution that happens, where any movie that got less than 1% of the vote is eliminated and its vote is transferred to the voter’s #2 choice (or, again, the highest-ranked choice that’s still in the running.)

“It’s complicated, and they never really talk about it because it just confuses people. But in practice it will almost always result in between five and 10 nominees.”

EW‘s Karger responded as follows: “As I understand it, your math is correct, Jeff. But as I also understand it, it’s highly unlikely that your hypothetical scenario would occur. Tom Sherak said in his announcement that in the past decade, if the new guidelines had existed, there would have been between five and nine nominees each year. The Academy is so diverse age-wise and taste-wise that I don’t think you’re ever going to see acclamation around just four films.”

The last word goes to In Contention‘s Tapley: “The new rules have me dizzy and entirely apathetic toward the intricacies of the process. In short, well played, Academy.”